Note from Cassandra: I’m over at Lua’s blog today but she has left a great post here for us all to read and enjoy. Thanks Lua for sharing these thoughts with us, and wishing you all the best on your writing journey.

‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’

By Lua Fowles … says Virginia Woolf and I think she has a point. It’s not just women who need a room of their own but I think it goes for all writers; we need solitude, we need quiet and we need a door to shot out the world. The Muse is a strange creature, it wants to be alone with the artist, it requires our full attention to help us put that story on to paper. So basically, yes Virginia, we need a room to develop that idea we have into a novel.

But that makes me wonder- what about before we discover (because lets face it, ideas are discovered not created) the idea of our story? It is necessary to get into our room and close the door once we have the story idea but what are we supposed to do with all that peace, quiet and an empty room when we have no story to tell?

I love the word “frustration”. The dictionary says it means, “a feeling of dissatisfaction, often accompanied by anxiety or depression, resulting from unfulfilled needs or unresolved problems.” That feeling of dissatisfaction, that impulse to solve the unresolved problems and fulfill our needs is what drives us to tell stories. For me, telling stories is the only way to make sense of this world, to understand myself and others, to stay in balance in this chaotic world. It is the only way that I experience satisfaction and solve my problems. In that case, I suppose, it’s safe to say that I need frustration before I need a bunch of money and a room of my own.

Ideas need to develop “outside the room”. They don’t develop because we’re perfectly satisfied with ourselves and with the world around us, they don’t emerge because we don’t have any issues with the world. They emerge from dissatisfactions and frustrations. Having a room is great, once you have your story idea. Then you can go inside your room and work on it, develop it, make it a masterpiece without any distractions or interference. But before that, to find your idea- you need to go outside and get frustrated a little. No- make that “a lot”. You need to get frustrated, a lot…

Lua Fowles is an aspiring writer from Istanbul Turkey, currently working on her first novel, ‘Closed Eyes, Change of Heart’… On her blog, Bowl of Oranges, she’s talking about the difficult but joyous journey of becoming a writer. She’ll be on her way to the University of Kent to get an MA degree on Creative Writing this September.

The blog tour started well with my visit to Eric’s blog. I want to thank Ericonce again for his brilliant post and for kicking off the tour. I then dropped in to Geoffrey’s blog for day two. Thanks so much Geoffrey for your excellent post here in the realm.

But there are many days to come in September.

Tomorrow I am visiting Lua Fowles blog where I discuss excuses for not writing, while Lua brings her own brand of wisdom here to the realm.

After that there is a bit of a break before I visit Sonya Clark on the 7th for an interview.

Thanks to everyone who has already started following the tour and I hope to see you on my ‘travels’.

Between now and the 7th, I have received an award that I am going to share.

Before I’m done though, here are the 5 things I’ve learned from planning this blog tour:

1. There are many, many helpful people out there, so when you ask if anyone would mind hosting you, be prepared for an inundation of offers.

2. It helps if you do a blog swap rather than just a visit and that way you don’t have to worry about writing two posts on a given day and it lets the people hosting you have a chance to visit another blog.

3. Make sure you have a bucket load of free time because you will spend twenty times longer writing the posts for the tour than any of your other blogs.

4. The time difference between Australia and America becomes really noticeable when trying to coordinate with people on the other side of the world.

5. Despite the work, this has been really fun and I can’t wait to plan another one next year.

Miz Jade is on her second day now of a whirlwind blog tour. That was not a phrase that actually held much meaning for me when she first used it, but she was kind enough to explain it to me, and it’s sort of been like that since I got started over on Misanthropology101 — Cassandra left the first comment on my first post, in fact (well ahead of my deadbeat friends), so it’s an especial pleasure to be visiting her blog in turn.

Cassandra invited me to say “something about writing communities and internet presence,” and I promised to give it a shot. She’s vastly more qualified to speak on the subject than I am, but I’ll try to lay some things out without lapsing into too much navel-gazing (people who really want to gaze at my navel can always visit Monday’s post at Misanthropology101, but I swear I didn’t time it that way deliberately).

Anyway, it all comes back to skills learned in kindergarten, or at least the sort of skills that other people say they learned in kindergarten (I learned that even if a kid was bigger than you a brick was still functionally bigger than him, but I was picking up exactly the opposite of the skills you want for getting along in online writing communities). Share and share alike, disseminate every interesting piece of information you know to anyone who will listen, don’t show anyone your swimsuit bits — that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Unselfconscious spontaneous interaction is what the writing blog/forum scene is all about!

To be sure, there has to be a certain amount of practical content, particularly for blogs. If you want to connect with other writers, it does help to have “writing” in the blog tags somewhere — I assume that’s how Cassandra found Misanthropology101, back when it was first getting started. She’s very good about keeping an out for newcomers on the scene (another great kindergarten skill). But I’ve learned that people are less interested in day after day of nuts-and-bolts technical lessons than they are in “Storytime with Geoffrey” (also true of kindergartners, to keep the metaphor rolling). I like many of my posts about writing technique, and think them to be generally good advice, but they are not the heavy hitters in terms of comments or pageviews.

That is because blogging — and writing, ideally — is about fun and about interaction. If people don’t get both of those things, fun and interaction, they aren’t going to come back for a second or third visit. And there’s certainly a self-serving element to all of this; we want people to have fun because we want them to keep playing with us, i.e., keep reading our blog or referring it to our friends or what have you.

And that’s just fine. There is nothing wrong with wanting your blog to be more known, more visited, more popular, whatever. The trick is to remember that you want all those things because it gives you more people to have fun with, not because the numbers are inherently valuable. So by all means tailor your writing for maximum entertainment and engagement, pander shamelessly, post topless pictures of yourself — whatever you think will be enjoyable to share. But remember that it’s all kind of silly unless the ultimate goal is to meet even more people that you enjoy sharing things with!

One thing that everyone seems to enjoy is lists, so I’ll finish one (and maybe should have started with it, for the short-of-attention-span):

GEOFFREY’S GUIDE TO BLOGGING LIKE A KINDERGARTNER

1. Say hello to everyone, especially if they say hello to you first. Introduce new friends to your other friends!

2. Share all your thoughts! Unless they are deliberately rude or mean.

3. The more fun everyone in the group has, the more everyone will want to play again.

4. No, seriously, the brick is bigger than you.

If you liked this post, tell Cassandra! Also tell your friends, and drop by Misanthropology101 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for many more absurd thoughts on the writing life. Cassandra’s guest post is of course featured today, and she is welcome back any time she likes — keep up the good work Miz Jade, and keep up the good reading all the rest of you!

Note from Cassandra: I’m visiting Eric’s blog today but he has generously agreed to guest post here in the realm. Thanks Eric, it is great to have you here. After you’ve checked out Eric’s post, pop on over to Working My Muse and check out the first post of my blog tour.

First off I’d like to say a huge thank you to Cassandra for having me at Casa ‘del Jade. Guest blogging here (being the first person, no less) is awesome beyond words. But since you’re all expecting at least a few words, I guess I better become temporarily brilliant.

When I began to search my brain for a topic, I’ll be honest; I became a little stressed. While I do have my own flair, this is a new type of fun and puts blogging on a whole new level. And fronting for Cassandra is pretty dang cool. This thought took me down an interesting path however, and I began thinking about my characters.

When we write our stories, it’s expected that our characters deal with change, with difficult situations. This is part of what helps propel our stories forward and keep the reader interested. But isn’t it reasonable to have our characters get a little stressed from time to time? And how do we show that in our writing? One way we can describe this is through physical effects. For example, I tend to get cold sores on the inside of my lip when I get too stressed. If I really get stressed out, upset stomach is an indicator. I can imagine something similar for my characters.

What about situational descriptions? If my characters come upon a body, torn apart from some unknown violence, do they just abstract about the nature of death or do they lose a bit of their usual cool demeanor? Consider the following conversation:

“Oh damn Billy, that guy’s dead. Lookit how his arm is hangin’ kinda wrong. And his head is split open like one of those punkins you toss out at Halloweenie.”

“Yep, he ain’t with us no more. Can’t tell who he was, but them tears along his belly look almost like Freddy Kruger claws. Weird, huh? So you wanna go get some pizza?”

Now unless you’re looking for a comedic moment, the reader might be expecting a little more from these two characters stumbling across an obviously mangled body. Dead bodies usually cause sane people to freak out a little. Perhaps one of them just crumbles on the floor, wailing in agony while the other one is more interested in investigating what happened to the poor chap. However you choose to deal with this situation, moments like these are a great opportunity to show characterization. The only caveat I would add is to avoid clichés or stereotypical responses to stress. If it fits your character honestly, then cool. But if it sounds like the same ol’ phrasing everyone uses, you probably want to avoid it.

To sum up, stress doesn’t have to be a bad thing, especially when we’re writing a story. Stress is one of the best moments we can use to bring our characters alive, make them truly real. Just keep the writing honest, not cliché. Thank you Cassandra for allowing me to grace your page. This has been a fun exercise for me.

As for the rest of you, have you stressed your characters out lately? If not, what are you waiting for? A stressed-out character is a real character – even if they’d rather be in Cancun sipping a margarita on the beach.

Turns out planning a blog tour is exciting, exhilarating, and a lot of hard work. The tour kicks off on Wednesday the 1st of September over on Eric’s blog, working my muse, and Eric is going to be visiting the realm so I am definitely looking forward to it.

I’ve been busy, writing guest posts, double checking links, making sure everything is going to plan and knowing that something is probably going to come up anyway. I’ve also been helping out with the 40 hour famine. As always, so much to do and so little time. Writing has definitely been taking a back seat but I’m getting back on top of everything so hopefully I’ll have a few really good writing sessions in the near future.

First week of the blog tour begins with Eric and then on the 2nd I am visiting Geoffrey, followed by Lua on the 4th. Hope to see you all there and please pass the word on.

It is how magicians get away with their tricks and it is frequently how movies manage to make even the weakest of stories seem somewhat plausible.

It would seem that in writing, distractions can’t save a poorly written story because you don’t have all the shine and glitter – you certainly don’t have an amazing soundtrack and special effects.

Still, many writers seem to use a bit of shine.

Colourful humour and language to throw the reader off the scent of poorly executed scene.

Flowery language and description to gloss over the massive plot hole.

Throw another dead body into a scene that was feeling like it was going nowhere.

Introduce a new character to hide the fact that one of your other characters has suddenly had a personality transplant.

And the thing is, as an audience member, you frequently allow yourself to be distracted by the shiny because it is fun. Because even though you know that you are being had, that something is missing, what you are being given is still enjoyable and there isn’t really any fun in pulling it to pieces. You know what is going on and you let it happen. At least when it is still enjoyable.

You start to really question the shiny when that is all you are being given. There is nothing else underneath and it isn’t really going anywhere. All you’ve been given is the glossy overcoat and there is no substance. As a reader, a lack of overall substance just can’t be tolerated.

So what shiny distractions do you enjoy reading? Which ones have you used? When won’t you accept a shiny distraction?

Alice recently tried to do six impossible things before breakfast and no one accused her of being too pessimistic in labelling them impossible.

Impossible seems to be a big no-no at the moment. It seems by pointing out that something is impossible you are being overly negative.

It may not seem like a nice thing to do but sometimes pointing out the highly improbably nature of certain outcomes can be a kindness. Of course it can also be tactless, mean, cruel and spiteful. I guess it all comes down to motivation behind the statement and the delivery.

But whether or not you like the word impossible, do your characters? Are they the negative type who likes to think that doors are closing everywhere around them when in point of fact they have millions of unrealised opportunities? Or are they optimistic to the point of insanity? Somewhere inbetween perhaps?

When people discuss character they talk about motivation and they talk about appearance and goals and all of these other sorts of things but the idea of them being an optomist or pessimist doesn’t seem to come up. The basic underlying personality that should motivate most of what they do.

I’ve actually been trying to figure this out for a character from one of my WIP’s that I’ve been playing with lately. The character is inconsistent at the best of times but I’m starting to see an underlying logic in her actions. She’s ridiculously optimistic. Her erratic actions and seemingly illogical behaviour actually come down to the fact that she genuinely believes that things will work out okay so you might as well jump. Now that I know where she’s coming from I can probably clear up some of her more bewildering actions and make it all kind of work out okay.

I’m going to preface this post by pointing out that I really dislike animal movies. That is, movies where the main character is an animal that is befriended by a human and does a range of cutesy/mischievous things before ultimately solving some massive problem and healing all the wrongs in their friendly human’s life while giving us some moral message. There are a lot of these movies out there and they are well loved movies but they’ve never grabbed me as an audience member. Mostly because cute didn’t cut it for me as a replacement for story or character development even when I was a child and the overly moralistic message of so many of these movies seemed really condescending.

That said, I do like animals in stories. They can serve a valuable role and if well written can even have all the attributes of a full fledged character. There is a difference between a movie with an animal in it and an animal movie. Same with books.

When I consider using an animal in a story I usually think about the following:

3. Is the animal actually acting in the way an animal would or are they simply a human character dressed up like an animal?

4. If the animal is magical and can talk, are they still acting in the way an animal would or is there some cross over between the animal characteristics and human characteristics? And is there any point behind this cross over?

5. Is the animal becoming simply a cute distraction from the plot?

Inserting an animal as a character for me is like inserting any other character. They need to have a purpose and serve some sort of function in the plot. They need to relate to the other characters and if possible those relationships should grow and change as the story progresses.

What are your thoughts on animals as characters? Or animal movies for that matter.

We could probably agree that very little writing is actually bad in the sense that at least words are getting written and it is a lot easier to make bad writing good than to make a blank page turn magically into good writing. However, if you’ve decided once and for all that what you’ve written is terrible and all you want to do is make it go away, here are five things to try that just might make you feel better.

1. Line the bird cage, rat cage, any other animal cage you can think of, with the print outs. Technically this is recycling and not only will the writing be well and truly gone, you’ll get that warm and tingly feeling from saving the planet.

2. Blow it up on the screen and then print it out. Cut up all the words and then stick them back together in random order. Read repeatedly to whomever you can trap long enough.

3. Cat toy. This one I have actually done. Cats love chasing scrunched paper, particularly over hard surfaces because the paper makes a great scratching sound that keeps them intrigued for minutes. Once they start getting bored all you have to do is throw it again and they’ll dive after it. If you really feel the need you could probably read the writing to your cat first, then scrunch it and throw it.

4. Art work. I don’t study art and don’t know what the style is (I could probably have googled it but I wasn’t really in the mood) but you can always paste various parts of your writing into the background of your painting. Call it something depressing and hang it up somewhere prominent.

5. Finally – something actually useful to do with bad writing – put it in a nice yellow folder on your desk top called ‘Junk’ and save it for the day when you just might decide you can do something with it.

I was thinking the other day about my post on the sycophant and that actually got me thinking about my most recent reading (I’m currently working my way back through Eddings, again, I know). What I started wondering was how many times should you remind your reader about the nature of a character (either through action or through other character descriptions). It seems that if you endless preface everything the character does by a reminder about why you like/don’t like them eventually your reader is going to get sick of being treated like a child with no attention span but if you don’t put enough cues and reminders in you risk your reader forgetting key points about that character.

In relation to my own writing I’ve noticed that I have a lot of reminders in first drafts. Most of my ‘abandoned’ projects are full of these prompts (some in bold for my reference so I remember what I was trying to convey about the character at the time). One in particular has something on nearly every single page to remind the reader that character S is meant to be unstable. Other characters hint at it, she does something that not clear minded person would do, an earlier incident is referenced, something is hidden from her because she may not be trustworthy. Every single page. Okay, I may have missed two pages because she wasn’t involved in either scene but you get the point.

Wouldn’t reading that just drive you up the wall? Wouldn’t you want to ask the author – how dumb do you think I am? You just told me she was unstable, you showed it clearly, move on with the story already.

At the same time, if she was called unstable, did one slightly zany thing and then consistently acted normally throughout the story, when her instability became essential to the plot, the reader may have forgotten it entirely and wonder what planet the author was on when they wrote that critical scene.

This brings me to Eddings (awesome epic fantasy writer that he is) and his use of provisional reminders. Mostly with the Ellenium trilogy I’ve noticed that as each character is introduced they are given, or demonstrate to have, a number of very specific character traits. These recur periodically but not to the point where the story is stagnating in flags and pointers. However, if a character is absent for multiple chapters, upon their return, one of the other characters will usually make mention of having missed something about them, or they will almost immediately do something that reminds you of their character traits. Also, at the beginning of the second and third books, the first time a character is reintroduced the protagonist makes a point of considering his companions but he does it in a way that isn’t too intrusive to the story and it is a pretty quick recap.

I think Eddings found that balance between reminding the reader of the critical points without getting endlessly repetitious, and he’s disguised his reminders for the most part or at least managed to weave it into part of the story.

So, writers and readers out there, what are your thoughts? Do you like to be reminded or do you like to move on with the plot? Is finding a balance the key?